The Architect screamed.

  He didn’t scream often. He was not a being given to screaming. He was a being given to the silent, precise identification of structural failures, which he expressed through the geometric language of flashing equations and technical alerts. The fact that he screamed was information in itself.

  “He’s being pulled in! The Zero-Point is a vacuum—it’s not just eating space, it’s eating Meaning!”

  On the screen, the Joker’s skiff lurched. The violet dot on the monitor jerked sideways, then began moving in the wrong direction—not toward us, not toward any navigational vector that made sense, but down. Inward. The Gravity Well of Pure Grief had him.

  “Joker!” The Architect’s transmission cracked with urgency. “Get out of there!”

  “I can’t!” The Joker’s voice broke. Broke. A sound I had never heard before from that particular throat. “It’s not pulling my ship, Architect—it’s pulling my Story! It’s erasing my memories! Boss—”

  And then something worse.

  His voice, losing its edges. Losing the specific inflection that made it his.

  “I’m forgetting… I’m forgetting the basement… I’m forgetting the—”

  Black.

  The signal cut.

  The violet dot stopped.

  I was standing by the time the silence completed itself. I had moved from the Garden bench to the edge of the observation platform without being aware of the transition. My hands were on the railing. The Gold in my veins had gone very still—the way water goes still just before something large breaks the surface.

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  The Arbiter turned to me.

  “The Canary has stopped singing, Prime.”

  His silver mask reflected the dead screen.

  “But he didn’t die. He was absorbed. Whatever is at the Center just got a taste of our code through him. It knows we are here.” A pause. The longest pause the Arbiter had ever allowed himself. “And it is starting to Pull on the Golden Ring.”

  I felt it.

  A massive, cold suction from the heart of the universe. Trying to drag everything I had built—all twenty-five billion souls, the Ring, the Garden, the jasmine and the stone—into whatever that Drain was at the center of everything.

  The Ring tilted.

  Just slightly. But I felt it through every golden vein in my body—the slight wrongness of a foundation shifting. A world built to stand forever discovering that forever has a floor.

  Elias was at my shoulder. His voice was steady in the way that very frightened very brave people’s voices are steady.

  “He’s our friend, Prime. But they’re our people.”

  He put his hand on the emergency release.

  “What’s the bet?”

  I looked at the dead screen.

  I thought about the Joker—the grin, the spinning eyes, the particular quality of absolute commitment to chaos that was, at its core, a form of loyalty so total it had never needed to call itself by that name. I thought about who he was in the first life and who he was in this one. The minion who became a god. The god who became a man. The man who had just given himself to the dark so that I could see what was in it.

  No.

  Not like this.

  “I’m not gambling with his life,” I said. “But I’m not gambling with theirs either.”

  My hand came away from the railing.

  I pressed it to my chest.

  Where the Sauce was thickest. Where the Gold ran deepest. Where two centuries of everything had concentrated itself into something that barely fit anymore inside the frame of a human form.

  “I’m going to build something,” I said.